Re: Proposal: Num instance for (a -> b)

relevant reddit comment thread: ...
Are you people completely nuts? Haven't you wreaked enough havoc with the Foldable Traversable Piffle? Why ref pointy-headed discussion on reddit when you could also ref far more frequent complaints: https://blog.plover.com/prog/haskell/type-errors.html "I think there must be something really wrong with the language design here. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think someone must have made the wrong tradeoff at some point." https://blog.plover.com/prog/haskell/evaluation-functor-2.html https://blog.plover.com/prog/haskell/evaluation-functor.html (It's by no means only that author complaining; it's just that was easiest to grab.) No, EKmett, including `length` in `Foldable` with a `((,) a)` instance is a lot more serious than "somewhat unfortunate".
At what point is it better to put "weird" stuff into its own libraries (or newtypes) and keep base clean?
Always the standard Prelude should be clean of "weird" stuff. So that beginners don't have to go round the houses to exclude the standard and get a sensible Prelude. A beginner has more than enough to cope with without piling the import mechanism on them. Whereas it's no burden on the pointy-heads to import WeirdPrelude. If the CLC process were to do anything useful, I'd expect yous to be organising that. And then I could leave yew lot to turn your Haskell into Perl, where any composition of symbols can acquire some meaning. As it is, the only reason I monitor the Libraries list is to complain about proposals for nuttiness. AntC

On Sat, 17 Nov 2018, Anthony Clayden wrote:
relevant reddit comment thread: ...
Are you people completely nuts? Haven't you wreaked enough havoc with the Foldable Traversable Piffle?
I am still using at most GHC-7.8.4 as main compiler because of broken type safety starting from GHC-7.10. Breaking type safety for everyone was achieved quickly, but restoring at least a bit of it for the ones who care will certainly not happen for years (presumedly not before more Wats are implemented): https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/11796 However, I cannot see how this relates to the Foldable desaster or to the Num (a -> b) issue:
Why ref pointy-headed discussion on reddit when you could also ref far more frequent complaints: https://blog.plover.com/prog/haskell/type-errors.html "I think there must be something really wrong with the language design here. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think someone must have made the wrong tradeoff at some point."
Since he already defined 'adj' as top-level function, I'd suggest he gives it a monomorphic type signature and all type ambiguities are gone. Top-level type signatures are good style anyway.
participants (2)
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Anthony Clayden
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Henning Thielemann